Courting deepest pockets

GOP race is on in fabulous haunts of the ultra-rich

Published 7:57 pm, Saturday, February 28, 2015

Palm Beach, Fla.

Instead of the corn dogs and pork chops on a stick ritually served up on the hustings of Iowa, the latest stop on the donor trail featured meals of diver scallops and chocolate mousse.

The setting was not a New Hampshire house party but the Breakers, a sprawling Italian Renaissance-inspired hotel, where the cheapest available rooms fetched $800 a night. And for the half-dozen Republican presidential candidates invited to the annual winter meeting this weekend of the Club for Growth, an influential bloc of deep-pocketed conservatives, the prize was not votes. It was money.

Long before the season of baby-kissing and caucus-going begins in early primary states, a no less decisive series of contests is playing out among the potential 2016 contenders along a trail that traces the cold-weather destinations of the wealthy and private-jet-equipped. In one resort town after another — Rancho Mirage, Calif.; Sea Island, Ga.; Las Vegas — the candidates are making their cases to exclusive gatherings of donors whose wealth, fully unleashed by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, has granted them the kind of influence and convening power once held by urban political bosses and party chairmen.

Even a single deep-pocketed donor can now summon virtually the entire field of candidates. No fewer than 11 Republican White House hopefuls will fly to Iowa this week to attend the Iowa Agriculture Summit organized by Bruce Rastetter, a businessman and prominent "super PAC" donor. Each will submit to questions from Rastetter, who said he wanted the candidates to educate themselves on agriculture policy.

"I get it that it's helpful that I've given nationally and been helpful in Iowa to different candidates," said Rastetter, whose business interests range from meat processing to ethanol production, and who is not yet backing anyone for president. "They know I'm going to be a fair arbiter in this," he added. "We're going to have a good discussion around these issues."

High season on the shadow campaign trail informally began in Coachella Valley in California the weekend before the Super Bowl, near the end of January, when Charles G. and David H. Koch hosted their annual seminar for a few hundred libertarian-minded donors. It continues through the early spring, when the Republican Jewish Coalition, a pro-Israel group bankrolled by the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, holds its annual meeting in Las Vegas, this year at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.

In between are a number of other gatherings of donors, representing overlapping clubs of the wealthy with particular passions and interests. Some are informal gatherings, like a daylong meeting last Tuesday near Jackson Hole, Wyo., hosted by the TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his son Todd, and featuring several Republican donors who favor same-sex marriage and immigration reform. Others, like the Club for Growth's conference here in Palm Beach, have been around in one shape or another for years, forming part of the longtime invisible primary for the allegiance of donors.

But the high-dollar donor trail has taken on far more importance in recent years because of the Citizens United case and the super PACs for which the decision cleared the way. Candidates attend knowing that just a handful of donors can lift them from the second or third tier of into the first.

For Jeb Bush, who has spent much of the past two months meeting privately with potential donors, occasionally posting photos on Instagram taken from outside private equity firms and investment banks, Rastetter's Iowa meeting will be his first official trip to the critical caucus state.

"They're here to help themselves," said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, of the half-dozen candidates who planned to appear.

"This is going to be the super-PAC election," said one Republican who attended the Ricketts meeting in Wyoming.